Magnified Photos of Tears as Otherworldly Aerial Landscapes

By Alison Nastasi

May 17, 2014

If scars are the roadmaps of our bodies, then tears are the maps of our souls — at least according to this photo series by Rose-Lynn Fisher, which we first spotted on Ego-AlterEgo. The Topography of Tears looks at 100 human tears through a standard light microscope. Magnified, they appear as vast aerial landscapes. “The project began in a period of personal change, loss, and copious tears. One day I wondered if my tears of grief would look any different from my tears of happiness — and I set out to explore them up close,” the artist writes on her website. Indeed, tears of joy and sorrow do appear to be different. “Although the empirical nature of tears is a chemistry of water, proteins, minerals, hormones, antibodies and enzymes, the topography of tears is a momentary landscape, transient as the fingerprint of someone in a dream. This series is like an ephemeral atlas,” Fisher poetically concludes. Get lost in the typography of tears in our gallery.

Photo credit: Rose-Lynn Fisher